Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law:

Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.

Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.

I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.

I think it's worth mentioning that with a patent, nobody else is allowed to use the patented idea. This holds even if they have never heard of you before, and were entirely unaware your patent (or your version of the patented concept) existed. You are granted a monopoly.

With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours. Someone unaware of your work cannot infringe your copyright. You do not have a monopoly on anything, you are just protected against someone deriving their work from yours directly.

This difference probably factors into how easy it is to win a lawsuit: for a copyright infringement, you need to show they made a copy. You wouldn't be bringing suit in the first place if there were substantial doubt in that area. It also factors into how easy it should be to get a patent vs a copyright: a patent closes off much, much, MUCH more idea-space than a copyright.

That's an interesting point that I'd never considered before. Thank you for sharing it.

Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights.

It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.

A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.

See also:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...

https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LT...

https://conversableeconomist.com/2013/03/29/is-intellectual-...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

And clothing designer...there is no copyright, suck it up.

They get a certain amount of mileage out of trademark, though not the same level of protection to be sure

> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours.

That is patently false for music - a songwriter's claim today that they never heard a slightly similar hook from 40 years ago generally doesn't hold in court.

I think they mean that they can for instance use the song non-professionally.

Classic case of how democracy isn't, in practice, majority rule.

If you put this demented situation to a vote, it'd lose 9-to-1.

Frankly the whole concept of copyright is absolutely stupid though, the equivalent of escalating schoolyard "stop copying me!" to actionable at a court of law. But since when did something being absolutely frothing at the mouth retarded stop it being an entrenched part of the world we live in.

What? Copyright and patents are exactly the same thing. Making "you copied me!" actionable at a court of law, by statute, when before that there was no such legal fiction of "intellectual property" or any other exclusive rights to reproduce a thing.

Indeed. Good example where value comes from. It's all the same crap, but since you've seen My Crap worn by Anne Hathaway a couple of times in ads at the airport, I can charge 10x price.

Outwith the U.S.A. there is a thing called a design right that applies to that.

In the U.K., the design right took its initial form in 1787 and applied to printed patterns on fabrics; so it has been on point for clothing design for over 230 years. (-:

How is that different from a patent then? I don't think anyone would sue you for patent infringement against your hobby project. IP only typically becomes an issue when you want to make some money from your work, and then someone claims that it's actually their work, and thus should be their money.

You basically replied to GP's eloquent and nuanced post with, "nah bro trust me, purple is actually blue!"

The burden of proof of infringement is on the plaintiff in either case.

If you have an obscure patent nobody has ever heard of, you can win the suit by showing that the defendant had the same idea you did - you don't need to show their work derives from yours.

If you have an obscure song nobody has ever heard (or even an unpublished one!) you are going to have a difficult time proving infringement for a similar riff.

Perhaps you're most familiar with litigation around very famous songs, like the Under Pressure / Ice Ice famous case? In those cultural-saturation cases the court may make the assumption that the later party could have been exposed to the work of the earlier one, but that is not the case universally.

Copyright and patents are absolutely not the same thing at all.

A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.

A copyright is a prohibition on someone copying you, with certain exceptions where they are allowed to do so ("fair use" or "fair dealing"). Copyrights also, in the USA, bring certain protections against people attempting to use a work in a way you did not intend even where they are not duplicating it.

A trademark is a prohibition on someone causing confusion by copying something you use to identify yourself, or by using/referencing it (without copying) in a context you don't wish.

A trade secret is a criminal prohibition on someone intentionally causing another to divulge certain information that you contractually banned them from divulging.

A security classification is a ban on certain ideas/information being shared with parties that a government agency did not wish them shared with, or used in certain contexts. This is not a protection available to individuals, only to governments.

A license is an intentional weakening of one or more of the above types of protection, potentially with attached civil penalties in the event the bounds of the license are exceeded. It can thus, when accepted, limit behaviour beyond what would normally be allowed by one of the IP types above.

All six of these IP types protect against Person B doing something that is in some way related to an activity Person A did earlier, but they are really quite different in what they cover and how. I don't agree at all they're the same thing.

I think you want them to be meaningfully different, for whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they both come down to "if I did the thing you already did, and that you laid claim to through some form of artificial statutory fabrication of rights, you can sue me".

Whether that means me exploiting having heard your song by playing your song myself, or exploiting your invention I examined by building it myself, they both come down to: statutory fabrication of fictitious "you can't do because they did already" rights, that at common law could have (rightly) only been achieved through keeping the thing a secret (e.g. still present to this day in say trading algorithms, and in software through the now ubiquitous SaaS model) and contacts (i.e. NDAs) flowing from that.

Congrats on proving your own point

Also the purpose is important too, to know how to move forward when the tech landscape shifts.

Patents are there to incentivize making it public how inventions work. Inventors would tend to keep their inventions as trade secrets, in fear that someone else will reap all the profits. This would slow the compounding effect of later inventions building upon previous ones. Therefore, patents give exclusivity to the inventor for a set period. In exchange, during this period competitors and others become aware of how the new tech works and hence they can prepare for the time when the patent expires, and then a host of derivative tech can appear. It has been perverted to an absurd parody where the vast majority of patents are not intented for actual use, never get licensed and simply provide cannon fodder and deterrent stockpiles in the lawyer wars between companies. The patents are so broad and vague that legally speaking tech companies are constantly tramping on each other's ground, resulting in a kind of stalemate truce where they agree not to sue, because the other would countersue.

Copyright is there to incentivize creative authorship and its dissemination to the public. By giving exclusive rights, the author can pull a revenue stream, making cultural/artisitic/intellectual creation more viable and hence spurring intellectual and cultural activity in society. The goal is to make authors incentivized to create. Not to drive up the stock prices of mega-publishers and music labels.

Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for buyers as to the identity of a seller or by falsely implying endorsement.

What's common to these is that they are overwhelmingly there to help broader social interests, a common good, in accordance with the enlightenment, somewhat romantic ideals of the optimist zeitgeist of the time when the concepts were defined. They involve restricting individual rights, such as free speech (you can't recite this or that poem in public). That restriction was done reluctantly, to serve higher purposes, like a thriving intellectual exchange and technological progress on a societal scale. It was not about trying to make things as cushy and profitable for huge conglomerates as possible.

See my other reply parallel to yours. There's no principle of "I did it first, therefore it's my property!". For example, if that was so, you could report an invention and get a patent for it without disclosing exactly how you did the thing. After all you did do it first, so it should be off limits by the (non-existent) "I did it first" principle. Instead, patent law requires "sufficiency of disclosure", meaning that you MUST disclose enough information that another skilled person can recreate the invention from the specified information. You get the time-limited exclusivity in exchange for disclosing the method so that others can work on top of it, refine the technique etc, so when the time comes that the patent expires, there will be improved versions. It is explicitly there to inspire others to work on the thing afterwards, just with some time delay.

Blurring distinct laws and their nuanced purposes into some generic "I call dibs!" principle is exactly what the propaganda part is. Because that creates a kind blurry haze in people's minds that even fills gaps that none of the existing laws currently block out. So people will feel like "that just feels illegal, but I can't exactly say what it violates". A kind of FUD around doing all manners of free intellectual activity in society.

There is no legal distinction between violating copyright "professionally" or not.

> I don't think anyone would sue you for patent infringement against your hobby project.

You are mistaken.

They got George Harrison for a different song that had a similar melody. Don’t think it was identical, though would have to investigate.

> With a copyright, people are allowed to do anything similar to you, so long as they do not derive their work from yours.

John C. Fogerty famously got sued by John C. Fogerty for sounding too similar to John C. Fogerty.

https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/fantasy-v-fogerty/

>A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.

Just FYI, as a layman with no opinion on whether they are "the same thing" in this context, this paragraph sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like you're describing copying somebody's idea, and then you say "It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you", so I ended up confused as to your meaning.

Let's say I come up with the idea of using a fan to blow a balloon into the air. I get a patent with the claim "a device made buoyant in air and propelled by forced wind".

Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath.

Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claimed as the core idea in my patent. They didn't "copy" me, for two reasons:

1. Their idea was had independently of mine, with its own creativity 2. Their idea is fundamentally not the same as mine, but because my enumerated claim is sufficiently broad to cover their concept too, it's still infringement

With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. With a copyright, you can't claim anything broader than the work you actually produced.

Also, patents are for frankly more important things. It's a much bigger deal if life-saving medicine or a more efficient car are locked out for 100 years than Winnie the Pooh wearing pants.

> With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe.

But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.

You can't sell a Harry Potter book, but you can sell any number of Magical School for Wizards books. They can use similar themes to Harry Potter, similar pacing, even similar artwork styles.

They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.

That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.

Harrison's song was "My Sweet Lord", the song allegedly infringed was "He's So Fine" by some girl group in the 1950s or 1960s. It shouldn't be hard to hear either one. My recollection is that the songs did some pretty much alike.

It's clearer than you think. Did Dua Lipa hear an obscure Florida reggae band's tune that isn't available on any major platform to listen to any more? It took some time, but eventually the court agreed she'd never heard the song she supposedly copied:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitating_%28song%29

The melody, not the song lyrics.

The group is The Chiffons and according to John Lennon, Harrison “walked right into it — he knew what he was doing.”

"property in general" is essentially a "legal fiction" because there are no natural property rights other than "I successfully guarded my pile of stuff against thieves". heck when you think of a complete body of law for instance, its all "fiction", if I were to use your terminology.